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DO NOTHING (2020)

DO NOTHING. Unproductive Conversations in Paradise was a collaboration between the Botanical Garden – Natural History Museum of Barcelona and Graner.An experimental project straddling the fields of botany and live arts, a dialogue between Ventura Garriga and Mariona Naudin with the collaboration of Odil Bright, aiming to navigate precisely this encounter between two worlds that are usually isolated from one another. Its title, *Do Nothing*, responds to a question that has long been on our minds in various forms. Ventura Garriga has spent years trying to understand whether it is possible to do nothing; Mariona Naudin has not stopped producing stage pieces since 2012 and has long been questioning whether it makes much sense to keep obeying the frantic rhythms of the cultural market. To address this issue, we place ourselves in the Old Botanical Garden to immerse ourselves in the world of plants and to put into crisis the notions of time and productivity. The intention is to generate questions, genuine thought circuits that arise from the encounter between us in this specific space. We have no goal beyond experimentation and observation and understanding where these circumstances will take us.

Do Nothing is a chimera, like searching for the Holy Grail. This unsolvable question has been in Ventura Garriga’s mind for some time, and today it serves as the starting point for this artistic proposal, which is a dialogue between Ventura and Mariona Naudin (artist-in-residence at Graner) with the collaboration of Odil Bright on sound accompaniment. Apparently, the Western imagination links *doing* with *being*: what we do defines our identity. This credo, which places action at the center, often forgets the constant and silent activity of plant life, which serves as the perfect counterpoint in this case to review our hyperproductive rhythms and our extremely anthropocentric way of viewing the world in this moment of paradigm shift.

Do Nothing is a dialogue between three humans and the Historic Botanical Garden, in which we have tried not to add anything extra and use the resources of the place itself to generate the scenic proposal.

Odil Bright is an artist from Barcelona. She studied the Master’s in Composition of Film Scores and Music for Audiovisual Media at ESMUC. For a period, she was a pianist in a hotel on Via Laietana and played guitar in a riot grrrls band that performed at Primavera Sound. She has composed music for cinema, theatre, and advertising, and has worked for companies and institutions such as FC Barcelona, Apple, and the Teatre Lliure. She composed the soundtrack for the documentary Me llamo Violeta (Audience Award at DocsBarcelona 2019). Currently, she is investigating the possibilities of musical creation in the field of multimedia programming.

Ventura Garriga is an inquisitive person who enjoys doing nothing. A gardener by trade, he currently works at the Parks and Gardens offices of Barcelona. He enjoys music, dance, and plants. He was introduced, as an adult, to the world of dance and performance. He has participated in performances by artists such as Sonia Gómez and Jérôme Bel. He worked with Yujiro Sagami on the ephemeral piece Living / Dead / Garden, which was created by the Japanese artist during his residency at Graner.

Mariona Naudin works in the field of Live Arts, but she is also interested in many other things such as anthropology, etymology, languages, and activism. She is currently an associate artist at Graner, where she has been working intermittently since 2016. She is co-founder and performer of the companies Mos Maiorum and Las Detectives, both based in Barcelona. She is currently in a semi-vegetative artistic state and is interested in learning more about the non-human and plant life around her, after having spent too much time trying to understand homo sapiens sapiens.

A collaboration between the Botanical Garden – Natural History Museum of Barcelona and Graner.
Artistic residency at the Botanical Garden, June-July 2020.
Process opening: July 16.

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